


Don't you know you're life itself?

by Philipa_Moss



Category: History Boys - Bennett
Genre: Canon Gay Character, Dakin being Dakin, Demisexuality, Depression, Established Relationship, Friendship, M/M, Post canon, Uninvited Guest, an upsetting lack of Housman, curtainfic-adjacent, or the like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-13
Updated: 2018-12-13
Packaged: 2019-09-17 07:42:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16970565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philipa_Moss/pseuds/Philipa_Moss
Summary: “Dakin thinks you’ll get bored of me,” Posner says, out of the blue, and Scripps says, automatic and habitual, “He doesn’t.”





	Don't you know you're life itself?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [samskeyti](https://archiveofourown.org/users/samskeyti/gifts).



> Title from "Wild Is The Wind"
> 
> I dealt with the question of movie-or-book ending by throwing my hands in the air and declaring it an implied mishmash of the two.

On Monday, Scripps buys his first mobile, an event that fills his heart with dread, and his editor’s with joy. Scripps has no qualms about turning forty—is delighted, in fact, to at long last reach what Dakin has always called the age of his soul—but the advent of on the go communication makes him feel old, and behave even older. 

He chooses the biggest one he can find, a phone approximately the size of a shoe. Posner, watching over his shoulder as he pulls it out of the box, rolls his eyes. “They have smaller ones now, different colors too.” 

“I know,” Scripps says. “Harder to lose this one, though.” 

They’ve just moved to a slightly larger flat, not far from where they lived when they first moved to London, and Scripps has been feeling at sea ever since. Items emerge from boxes and are assigned new homes, but Scripps can only ever remember where they were in their old flat, the one with the shrieking radiators above the kebab shop. This flat has better light, though. Posner follows it from place to place like a cat. This flat is altogether nicer. And if their old flat felt like a place to become a writer and this flat feels like a place to put away writerly dreams, Scripps knows enough it keep it to himself. 

The mobile, too, feels like the end of something. Auden and Isherwood never had to put up with screaming electronic infants clipped to their belts. 

“Turn it off when you’re writing,” Posner says. “You only ever write at the weekend, anyway.”

Scripps wants to retort that he’s always writing, but it’s more that he always feels that he’s writing. He never got out of the habit of taking notes, only now he keeps most of them in his head. 

On Wednesday, Scripps has had his mobile two days and he only wants to chuck it into the Thames five times a day. As if sensing that peace is soon to be restored, the Almighty seeks His revenge and Scripps comes home to find Dakin is asleep on their couch. 

It isn’t even that late—eight o’clock under a heavy, dark sky—but Dakin is snoring and drooling onto the arm of what looks to be Scripps’ old University Challenge crewneck, the one his roommate had made for him as a joke.

Posner’s in the kitchen, doing something with potatoes, which is odd in and of itself. Posner doesn’t cook. Scripps is the one who cooks, studying the recipes his mother sends in the post with academic fervor. It’s her most consistent acknowledgement that Scripps has set up a household of his own. The rest of the time she studiously refers to Posner as his friend. Scripps’ dad does the same, though when the landlord gave them shit about a burst pipe, he got his lawyer friend onto it without having to be asked. 

“He ate the leftover curry,” Posner says without looking up. He starts to cut another potato. “He just looked so helpless, like a sad pug. I couldn’t say no. I’m sorry. I know you were saving it.”

Posner is jittery. His speech is brittle. He’s been on edge all week and Scripps has suspected the beginnings of anxiety attack. They usually build over a few days and crest midweek. In the normal course of things, Posner can put paid to them on his own, with Scripps mainly helping by acting as though nothing is out of the ordinary. Trust Dakin to show up now.

“Hello,” says Scripps, slow and calm. He kisses the side of Posner’s head and Posner collapses onto him a little, leaning, potatoes forgotten. “How was your day?”

“Fine,” says Posner. “No, shit, sorry, it was shit. Then he showed up drunk after lunch.”

Scripps wants to ask whether Posner made it out of bed by the time Dakin arrived, but he knows when to push, and Posner already revised his “fine” into something else. Even three months ago he wouldn’t have done that. So instead Scripps asks, “Why’s he here? You could’ve called. I’ve got a mobile and all.”

“Cathy left him,” Posner says, sliding the potatoes into the pot of boiling water. “That’s what he says, anyway. I believe him. If he were lying, he’d say it was the other way around. And I didn’t want to bother you.”

“Fuck,” Scripps says. He remembers the last time the four of them had dinner together and Cathy had seemed…well, she’d seemed as odd and argumentative as ever. Cathy was by far the worst of Dakin’s wives, but he appeared to love her. 

“Fuck indeed,” Posner says. “He wants to stay a few days. I said he could.”

“’Course,” Scripps agrees. He glances at the potatoes, boiling away. “I ate.”

“Of course you did,” Posner sighs, and turns off the stove.

 

It isn’t an auspicious start to the night, so, once they give up on food and turn in, Scripps is surprised to come out of the toilet to find Posner already under the covers. Usually, he stays up reading. Sometimes he doesn’t come to bed at all until early in the morning. He doesn’t like to wake Scripps when he can’t sleep, but half the time Scripps wakes up anyway, missing the weight of him. 

“Well, this is nice,” says Scripps, sliding under the duvet and extinguishing the lights. He is pleasantly surprised to find Posner naked and he pulls him close, just holding him at first, then moves to pull off his own boxers and shirt.

Posner nips at his ear, maybe not even as a prelude to anything, maybe just because it’s there. Scripps pulls him closer. They lie still and breathe in the dark. 

Then Posner shifts, bringing one leg between Scripps’s. “Do you want to?”

“Do you?” Scripps asks. He hopes he doesn’t sound skeptical. Sex is a moving target for both of them, but Posner gets frustrated with himself when he’s the one holding up the train. Scripps has told him again and again that it’s fine, but sex is much more a part of Posner’s identity than it is Scripps’s, so his reassurances only hold so much weight. 

“I do want to,” says Posner. “Besides, it should work. Dakin had some Viagra.”

“What?” Surely Dakin would have blared to all and sundry (or just Scripps and Posner, or just Scripps, because Dakin hasn’t met a problem he hasn’t wanted to foist on Scripps as well) if he had a dodgy cock.

“He had it in the overnight bag he packed,” Posner says. “Some men use it recreationally, you know. When I was making the couch up for him I saw it and nicked it.” He rolls over, reaching for the seven-day dispenser he keeps on his side of the bed. He comes back holding a small blue pill, indistinguishable to Scripps’ untrained eye from one of his usual antidepressants.

“How do you know that’s Viagra? It’s Dakin. It could be ecstasy for all you know.”

“Close enough,” Posner says coyly, shifting closer to Scripps. “But it is Viagra. I looked it up.”

“Are you sure,” Scripps begins, hesitates, and then presses on. “Are you sure we ought to?”

Posner’s grin dampens somewhat. “Scrippsy, don’t look a gift cock in the mouth.”

“I just meant what about the interactions and so forth? I don’t want you to—I don’t want you to hurt yourself over this.”

Posner frowns. He closes his hand around the pill. “I’m not a wilting flower, _Donald_. I think I get some say in whether I fuck my partner.”

He’s going about this all wrong. Scripps takes a deep breath and lets it out. “And your partner? Does he get a say?”

“Of course you do,” snaps Posner. “What do you take me for? Of course you do.”

“Then I don’t want to.” Scripps crosses his arms. “Not until I see proof that this isn’t going to, I dunno, make your head explode or your heart stop.”

“My heart is not at issue,” Posner mutters, flinging his legs off the side of the bed.

“But it’s what I care about. What are you doing?” Because Posner has already crossed to Scripps’s corner desk and is booting up his computer.

“You want proof,” says Posner. “And I want to get laid. So shut up and let me research.”

Scripps sighs and flings himself back on the bed. “Just be sure you’ve checked your sources.” He can’t quite help the smile that settles on his face when Posner chucks a wad of paper at his head.

 

The next morning, Dakin takes one look at Scripps and bursts into laughter. Scripps pats his hair down self-consciously, but does nothing about the dopey grin that is doubtless covering his face. He learned a long time ago that Dakin would take whatever you gave him and run with it. 

Dakin smirks. “At least now I know you weren’t lying, at school. There’s no hiding that Just Got My End Away face.”

“Excuse me,” Posner says, coming in behind Scripps. “Who says it was his end? Or rather, who says it wasn’t?”

Dakin, to his credit, looks impressed. It’s the first time Scripps really believes the Irwin thing could have happened.

“Well, well, well,” Dakin says. “If I had known you lot were having so much fun I would’ve gone to Crowther’s instead. He’s _somewhere_ in London. Thought I could count on you two to be as miserable as me.”

Scripps ignores him, in favor of buttering toast. So Posner’s the one who says, “Who said you had to stay with any of us? Don’t you have other London friends to invade?”

Dakin shrugs and affects a studied neutrality. “They’re all her friends. Cathy’s. Turns out I’m shit at making friends.”

Posner looks on the verge of saying something pointed, so Scripps steps in. “Not that we’re not delighted to have you—”

“You look it.”

“—but, how long?”

“Not long,” Dakin says. He spreads marmite on his toast with perhaps only half-fudged self-assurance. “I was down in the dumps yesterday, but today I have an entirely new outlook on life. Two days, four days in a pinch, and I’m out from underfoot. I promise.”

Dakin still isn’t gone a week later when he invites Scripps down to the pub. It’s a rainy Sunday and Posner’s been sleeping on and off all day, so Scripps goes along because on days like this he wants nothing more than a meat pie and a pint. Dakin finds a place where he can have them both by the fireside.

“What are your plans?” Scripps asks, when they’re ensconced and Dakin has stopped ogling the woman behind the bar for one second. “Are you looking for a place?”

Dakin shrugs, and stuffs his mouth full of rabbit. “She’ll take me back.”

This has never happened before, at least not once divorce has been threatened, but Scripps just nods. It occurs to him that Dakin hasn’t been sleeping particularly well. His eyes are dull between jibes. “You’ll want your own place while you wait, though,” says Scripps. “That sofa can’t be comfortable this many nights running.”

“All in good time,” says Dakin. “Besides, I’m taking some time off so I’m not pressed. What’re you writing these days?”

“Not much,” says Scripps. “Don’t try and distract me.”

“Your hours must be long,” Dakin says. “When’s Posner going back to work?”

“We’re all right,” Scripps says easily, because this is a well-trodden path. “Thanks for your concern.”

Dakin sees through him, it’s clear from his look, but he nods. “Sounded all right last night, that’s for sure,” he says. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t think you had it in you. Either of you, but especially you. I had to put my earplugs in. He sounded—”

“He stole your Viagra,” Scripps says. 

Dakin bursts into laughter. “The sneak! Well, did you enjoy it?”

Scripps gets a sudden flash of the way Posner’s brow furrows when he’s about to come, his palm on the back of Scripps’ sweaty neck. He coughs and takes a swig of beer to cover.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Dakin says. “Good, then. You have a lot of time to make up for. No wonder he’s all tired out.”

Scripps rolls his eyes, shakes his head. He tries to remain where he is, right here in this pub. He tries to let what Dakin says burst in the air like bubbles.

 

Scripps is editing his way through a singularly inarticulate piece on the Iraqi elections when Máiréad, a financial reporter in her early 30s with unruly hair and devastating shoes, lets herself into his office. She leaves the door open behind her, something she has been scrupulously careful to do ever since the newsroom Christmas party when she got drunk and dropped thick hints about wanting to get Scripps under the mistletoe.

He’d rebuffed her, gently, by pretending not to notice what was happening and then leaving it to Edward, a married father of three, to take her aside and let her know the score. Scripps isn’t out at work, but he isn’t in either. In fact, the way he approaches questions of sexuality now that he is, to all intents and purposes, married to a man isn’t all that different from when he was eighteen and a virgin.

People like Máiréad, he imagines, must assume it’s out of shame that he does this, but it’s not. Scripps keeps generally mum on the subject of his personal life out of consternation that anyone would find it in the least bit interesting.

Máiréad has dealt with any post-party awkwardness by embarking on a campaign of friendship, inundating Scripps, whenever possible in passing, with a series of hilarious anecdotes. Their interactions have been light and controlled. So he’s surprised when Máiréad hesitates, glancing around the room as though unsure of where to start.

Scripps never really learned how to do anything other than wait, so he waits.

“Your…boyfriend,” Máiréad says finally.

“Yes,” Scripps says, when it becomes clear she’s stalled. “What about him?”

Again Máiréad hesitates. Then she goes on in a flood. “It’s only because I’ve been trying not to make a fool of myself that I’ve been paying such close attention, so, there’s that, this isn’t a stalking, please don’t think this is a stalking.”

“I don’t think this is a stalking,” says Scripps. “If you’re trying to stalk me, this isn’t the way to do it.”

“Right,” says Máiréad. “Right.” She sits on the edge of his desk. “Well, I think my brother’s depressed.”

Straight from central casting, that’s what Scripps once thought a depressed person would look like. Bags under his eyes, the whole lot. And it’s true that sometimes Posner could still play a Hollywood depressed person with remarkable aplomb, unwashed hair and unlaundered pajamas and hardboiled eggs three meals in a row and all, but more often it’s not about what he does but what he doesn’t do. Like when he goes out to dinner with Scripps and Scripps’ favorite colleagues and does and says everything right, but with absolutely nothing behind his eyes, the same expression he’d wear at a cricket match or a funeral or at the bottom of the sea. 

“Ah.”

“I mean I know he’s depressed,” Máiréad goes on. “And based on some things you’ve said, here and there, not that I’ve been, like, tallying them—”

“Yes,” says Scripps.

“His wife’s leaving him,” Máiréad says. “And I could kill her. ‘You wouldn’t leave if he had cancer,’ I said to her, and she rolled her eyes, so maybe she would, the stupid bitch.”

“People do,” Scripps says, because the alternative is agreeing that Máiréad’s sister-in-law does sound like a stupid bitch. “It’s not always nice but you can’t martyr yourself. It can’t be the reason you stay.”

“Can’t it?”

“No,” Scripps says firmly, because if he believes anything, he believes this. “If you stay and you’re resentful, you’re worse than useless. No one is easy to be with, not really, not unless you have the patience of a saint. Or because you actually do want to stay. For some other reason you want to stay.”

“So you…stayed.”

“I stayed,” Scripps says. He can’t imagine the life he would have lived. He might have written a novel. He might have failed ten thousand times, and worse. He might still believe in easy fixes. “I can’t say much more because it’s not mine to share, but if it’s support you want—”

“Yes,” Máiréad says quickly. “Anything.”

“I’ll write it down. For the both of you.”

 

November becomes December and Dakin remains on the couch. Scripps would be lying if he said he wasn’t concerned, at least for a little while, in a very tiny part of his brain, that such sustained proximity would revive Posner’s twenty-years-dead crush, but as time passes it seems that the task of sharing space with Dakin is more disillusioning that anything else. Or, not quite disillusioning but its close cousin. Posner has figured out how to be Dakin’s friend.

More than once, Scripps comes home to find the two of them on opposite ends of the couch, watching Corrie.

“How can you enjoy this?” Dakin mutters through a mouthful of crisps. He appears, nonetheless, riveted.

“What you must understand,” Posner explains, “is that programs like this exist for two purposes: to bring their viewers pleasure and to slowly but surely advance a progressive social agenda by showing up in your sitting room like clockwork. Can you say the same of Waugh? Can you say the same of _Chariots of Fire_?”

“Oh all right, forget I asked.”

Scripps sits down between the two of them. Posner takes his hand and squeezes. Dakin flings his feet into Scripps’s lap. “Give ’em a rub,” he says. 

Scripps shoves them right back down. “You are not sliding into my marriage feet-first. Or at all.”

“It was worth a shot,” Dakin says. He gets up. “I’ll go make dinner, shall I, like a good little wife.” He curtseys and leaves.

“It’s no wonder they split up,” Scripps begins to say. “If that’s his idea of—”

Posner leans in, high drama. “He’s told me.”

“Told you what?”

“Why Cathy left. I assumed there was another woman and I told him so. He didn’t seem offended. If anything, he was smug. But there’s no one else. She just got bored of him.”

Of the many emotions Dakin elicits, boredom is so seldom one. Scripps is skeptical. “He told you this?”

“I know,” Posner says. “He’s clearly rattled.”

Scripps thinks. It makes a certain kind of sense. A committed Dakin has never been a successful Dakin. A haphazard, half-sneering Dakin, on the other hand, that’s the Dakin who’s glided through more than his fair share of glory.

“He thinks you’ll get bored of me,” Posner says, out of the blue, and Scripps says, automatic and habitual, “He doesn’t.”

Posner sighs. “He does. He didn’t say it, but he’s been asking questions and he clearly thinks it. I know he’s wrong, obviously, but, you know, it weighs on you.”

“You’re more likely to get tired of me,” Scripps says. 

It’s an old refrain and Posner ignores it. He continues, “Anyway, best not to talk too much about her. Or about leaving people. Or about Rembrandt. Apparently Cathy loved Rembrandt.”

Scripps can’t remember the last time he thought about Rembrandt. “I’ll tell you some other time about Máiréad at the office, then,” he says. 

Posner rolls his eyes. “What now?”

“Nothing like that,” Scripps says. “Her brother got left. Depression.”

“Mm,” Posner says. He gives Scripps a long, even stare, evaluating. “Convenient.”

“I know,” Scripps says. “I can’t think why, unless he snores.”

Posner goes to dig an elbow into Scripps’ side but Scripps catches him. Finally he nods. Posner smiles a private smile. “Well that’s all right then,” he says. “I never snore.”

Posner barely sleeps, but when he does, he snores like the Underground rumbling feet below a quiet matinee. Scripps has tried every earplug invented and when Posner isn’t there he misses the sound. 

From the kitchen, Dakin shouts, “Where are the gays keeping their spatulas these days?”

Posner’s eyebrows climb his forehead.

“Don’t look at me,” says Scripps.

 

It went like this: Oxford, and a girl in Scripps’ bed for the first time, and Posner on the train home for a “break.” Christmas, and Scripps introducing his parents, his delighted parents, to his girlfriend, and Posner in the pub buying rounds. They like each other, Scripps’ girlfriend and Posner. “I like her,” Posner slurs in Scripps’ ear, his eyes on Dakin in the corner with Timms. “I like him,” Scripps’ girlfriend whispers after the lights go out on his childhood bed. “I like it when men have gay friends.” And Scripps says, “He’s just my friend,” because anything else is wrong, and so is this somehow.

Easter, and Posner is inpatient in a place with sea foam walls, but, “It’s all right,” Posner says when Scripps comes to visit, “because we don’t celebrate, famously.” Later, Dakin asks Scripps how Posner is and Scripps walks away, just walks away from him, because Dakin still doesn’t understand what it means to let Posner pass through his hands.

Christmas, and Posner has medication, and a job, and a boyfriend named Curtis, and Scripps loves it all except the last bit. He hates the last bit. He hates Curtis because Curtis hates Posner. Why else would he tell Posner he thinks it’s funny when he sings? Why else would he complain when Posner’s too unwell to go out?

Scripps comes to Posner’s flat to watch telly on New Year’s because Posner doesn’t want to be around people and neither does Scripps, though for very different reasons. They don’t talk, but at some point Posner rests his head on Scripps’ shoulder, and it’s not that Scripps has never thought about what it would be like to kiss a man, but he’s never had the smell of another man’s scalp in his nostrils. He’s never wanted to translate that into burying his nose in the man’s hair, in lying down beside him, in holding him close. In holding Posner close.

Curtis comes back after one in the morning and finds them like that. Scripps only remembers snatches of it later, but he does take the hand Curtis uses to shove at Posner’s neck and grinds it into the wall. Even in the moment he is amazed at himself. Posner’s eyes go wide as saucers and Curtis grits out, “It doesn’t hurt him,” and Scripps just stares. He remembers that part. 

“I didn’t think it would be you,” Curtis says as Scripps watches him pack his things up. “I thought you were harmless.”

“Who cares what I am?” Scripps says, and as comebacks go it’s not a patch on some light violence, but Curtis still leaves.

Summer, and its long, low heat. Scripps spends a week of it at home, sharing every minute Posner can spare. He’s not sure what he’s doing, but whatever it is isn’t all that different from what he used to do before. It’s just laden with possibility. He just spends a lot more time looking at Posner’s eyelashes. He cycles to Posner’s flat for dinner one night and they smoke some of the grass Posner sometimes gets from a girl he met at the hospital and then Posner drops the pizza they were meant to eat facedown on the floor, comically perfect. Scripps laughs so hard he thinks he might be sick and Posner kisses him.

Parts of it are shockingly easy, leading Scripps to believe that he and Posner have been together much longer than anyone has noticed, least of all either of them. Other parts are difficult. Scripps hasn’t yet found the words to explain his relationship to sex and Posner still feels guilty at times about the workings of his brain. They get cross with each other. They muddle along.

Dakin, of all people, is the first to mention it. He’s got a job in Manchester but he drives over at the weekend. He stares at the two of them across a pint and when Posner leaves he slams his lager down on the table and says, “You wanker. That was a long game, eh?”

Scripps doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Or, he does, but it’s not a game. Try explaining as much to Dakin, though.

“It’s ’cause you started so late,” Dakin explains, foam on his upper lip. “You’ve still got your experimenting to do.”

And there, at last, Scripps must protest, because he’ll be damned if that’s it. “No,” he says. “It’s real.”

Dakin shuts up. He is flummoxed, which is hilarious. Scripps would have scored his powers of close reading a sight higher than this. 

By this point, of course, Dakin is married to his first wife, a woman named Jennifer who is utterly charming and utterly wrong for Dakin. Scripps and Posner drive over to Manchester and Dakin has her corral Posner at the bar while he drags Scripps off to the corner to talk, man to man, one assumes. Dakin always was fond of that kind of heads or tails thinking, despite everything.

“We could have had fun,” Dakin says, punctuating every word with a jab to Scripps’ sternum. 

Scripps sighs. “You’re still on about this?”

“If I had known, we could have had fun.”

Scripps rolls his eyes and shakes his head. “Not a chance.”

 

Sometimes, when Scripps masturbates, Dakin comes to mind. Not in a pleasant way, no, absolutely not—Scripps would as soon fantasize about his grandmother—but, rather, he imagines Dakin’s smirking face, his, “stand well back,” the delight he would be sure to express at length if he knew the degree to which masturbation constituted Scripps’ married sex life.

It puts Scripps off, and it’s been happening more and more often since Dakin moved in. Scripps would much rather say, “came to stay,” than, “moved in,” even in the privacy of his own thoughts, but he has to face facts. Dakin shows no sign of leaving.

“What’s wrong?” Posner asks one morning when Scripps comes out of the shower. 

He hadn’t realized he’d let it express itself on his face. It’s pretty much out of the question to say, “I can’t wank without thinking of Dakin,” but it’s what he says.

Posner’s face does something best described as flickering, though if the phrase appeared in anything making its way across Scripps’ desk, he would make liberal use of the red pen. Scripps scrambles to clarify. “I mean because he never stops going on about it, though he basically thinks I’m straight and fooling myself.”

Though Scripps means to be comforting, Posner draws entirely back at this, sitting against the headboard and pulling the covers almost up to his ears. It would be hilarious in another context, exactly the kind of pearl clutching they’d been so good at reciting for Hector.

“No, wait,” Scripps says. He takes a deep breath, centers himself, and sits down next to Posner. “He’s wrong, obviously. And he only pops into my head because he’s inescapable. Every joke from school, I hear in his voice.”

Posner is quiet, but he lowers the covers and eyes Scripps, considering.

This seems invitation enough to go on, so Scripps goes on, the words coming out half-considered and not at all planned, which he would never allow under any other circumstances. But his need to be clear, his skepticism about haphazard vulnerability, pales next to Posner’s discomfort. “It’s difficult having him around the house,” he says. He continues, “Because I know what my life is like when it’s just the two of us, and I trust it. Even when we had dinner with Dakin and Cathy or whoever it was that year, I could sit there with my roast and know, ‘Yes, I’ve got the right end of the stick.’ But this?”

“What about this?” Posner asks. He’s crossed his arms, and he looks more irritated than concerned, which Scripps counts as a step in the right direction. 

“You remember what it was like, listening to Dakin go on.”

“I do. You always knew what to say.”

“It was cover. I was good with words. He only caught me out once or twice, but I remember what it was like, thinking I was so odd I couldn’t even muster up a crush on him like you.”

Posner’s eyes narrow. “I wouldn’t wish that crush on my worst enemy.”

Scripps nods. “I know that now.” He thinks about how to say what he has to say next. There is no way to get it out that isn’t messy and possibly unfair. He tries anyway. “You and Dakin both wanted to get your mouths on someone. I wanted someone to hold at night. I know you wanted that too, but it wasn’t all. For me, that was all. For me, sometimes that’s still all. Not always, but a lot of the time. And when I wank it’s like scratching an itch I can call up at will, it’s something I control. So to have Dakin’s smug face intrude…” He takes a deep breath. He’s supposed to be the solid one.

But Posner is nodding. “You never told me this in so many words.”

Scripps shrugs. It wasn’t worth mentioning at the time, first because it would have made it real and then because, he thought, his feelings for Posner rendered it irrelevant. “But you knew.”

“I thought you were religious,” Posner says. “Then I thought you were a better person than me. Then I was jealous, because it doesn’t bother you when we can’t fuck.”

“It bothers me sometimes,” Scripps says, because why not, when he’s bleeding all this truth from the mouth. Then he groans and buries his face in his pillow. Admitting all of this, even to Posner, even to himself, feels like a tactical defeat. 

Posner rests his hand on the top of Scripps’ head. He starts stroking his hair. “I love you,” he says.

“I love you too,” says Scripps, into the pillow.

“I’m sick of talking about Dakin,” Posner says.

“I know,” says Scripps. “I’m sorry.”

“I want to make you happy,” Posner says.

“You do make me happy,” says Scripps, rolling to the side, because it’s important he says this to Posner’s face. “Every day you make me happy.”

Posner raises an eyebrow. “ _Every_ day?”

“Well,” says Scripps. “No. Obviously not. Who could? I’m a solitary bastard.”

“Come here,” says Posner, and Scripps moves to lie alongside him, breathing into his hip. “Thank God we found each other. Who else would put up with either of us?”

Scripps laughs a halfhearted laugh. He’d put up with Posner ten thousand times over. “I know,” he says. “Terrible, the pair of us.”

“I don’t know how he puts up with us,” Posner says.

“I don’t know how anyone does,” says Scripps.

“I’ll throw him out tomorrow,” says Posner. “He’s too noble to save himself.”

“Throw him gently,” says Scripps. “He’s not as hardy as we are.”

 

Dakin has been gone three days when Scripps’ mobile rings. He’s standing in the middle of Asda, weighing one can of tomato sauce against another nearly identical can of tomato sauce when his pocket explodes into noise. He somehow manages to not drop the sauce and answers. 

“I think you’re missing something,” Crowther says. “I think you’d better come get it.”

Scripps imagines Dakin, washed up on Crowther’s doorstep and not in the flat he claimed to have found. It makes his chest hurt a little. 

A little. “Tell him to call me when he’s settled,” Scripps says. “We can go to the pub.” He hangs up. Then he goes home.

Posner is sitting on the couch reading Rebecca. He puts it down when Scripps comes in. “I cleaned the bath,” he says.

“Thanks,” says Scripps. “I thought chicken for dinner.”

“All right,” said Posner. “I’m hungry today.”

And it’s nothing much, but it makes Scripps want to write, so after they’re done with dinner and Posner is back to his book, Scripps goes and turns on his computer. While he waits for it to boot up, he wonders whether he will ever be able to write, becalmed. Without a mess to untangle, what would he want to say? 

From the other room, Posner shouts, “The second Mrs. De Winter is a right old pill, isn’t she?” Then there’s a thud. “Ooh. Dropped my ice cream. Will you take a blowjob later?”

And he wants to laugh, at himself and at Posner, so he does. They’re such a never-ending mess, the both of them. A wonderful mess. Who could get bored with any of it? 

“Yes!” he calls back, and if he feels a little twinge of nerves, a little uncertainty in the belly, he knows it has nothing to do with Posner. He’ll find his way right. There’s so much to write down.


End file.
